U.S. Seeks $3 Billion for Pakistani Military

Gen. David H. Petraeus testifying on Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee.Credit
Jay Premack/Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON — In a new effort to bolster Pakistan’s fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Pentagon is proposing a plan to spend about $3 billion over the next five years to train and equip Pakistan’s military.

The money would include up to $500 million in an annual emergency war budget that the Obama administration will submit to Congress next week, Pentagon officials said Thursday. The money would pay for helicopters, night-vision goggles and other equipment, and for counterinsurgency training for Pakistan’s special operations forces and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops.

But some influential House Democrats who praised the idea of helping the Pakistani military said the new program, called the Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, would circumvent the State Department’s role in overseeing security assistance to international allies.

“This extends a pattern of militarizing foreign assistance,” Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a telephone interview.

The new approach, which requires Congressional approval, would give responsibility to the Pentagon and its Central Command for consulting with Pakistan’s military and determining what equipment and training it most needed to fight an Islamist militancy that is gaining momentum in the country’s unruly tribal areas. The fund would also be used to replace equipment the Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps lost in combat.

“It is a specific fund designed, again, to help the Pakistani forces develop specific capabilities — counterinsurgency capabilities,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, the leader of the Central Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

General Petraeus and other senior American officials declined to provide details of the program until the administration sent Congress its budget request.

Military supporters of the program said it offered a speedier alternative to the traditional military assistance process overseen by the State Department, which critics say is slow to respond to the needs of a rapidly shifting counterinsurgency campaign. The traditional military aid program provides Pakistan about $300 million a year, but does not focus solely on counterinsurgency goals.

The new military assistance program would complement legislation calling for $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years proposed by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the top Democrat and Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The United States has provided Pakistan with more than $12 billion in military and economic assistance since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including about $1 billion a year to reimburse Pakistan for fielding 100,000 forces along its border with Afghanistan. American lawmakers have complained that much of that money has disappeared into Pakistani government coffers with scant accountability and little progress to show.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged Thursday that the United States had not imposed sufficient accountability measures on the money.

“There hasn’t been an audit trail, and there haven’t been accountability measures put in place, and there needs to be for all the funds,” Admiral Mullen said in an interview with the editorial board of The New York Times. “So we’re going to do that. For this counterinsurgency money, which is important, it is critical that it goes for exactly that and nowhere else.”

Admiral Mullen, who has worked extensively to build a relationship with the Pakistani army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, noted that the Pakistani military had difficulties transforming from a military that recruited, trained, deployed and promoted its officers based on performance along the eastern front with India to one that focused instead on terrorists and insurgents within its own borders. “That’s not going to change overnight,” he said.

Insurgents and terrorists operating in Pakistani safe havens are plotting attacks against targets in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the admiral said. “The Taliban, in particular, are going both ways now,” he explained. “They are coming toward Islamabad and they are actually going toward Kabul. I’m completely convinced that the vast majority of the leaders in Pakistan understand the seriousness of the threat.”

Admiral Mullen also cited the significance of the Congressional legislation to increase civilian aid to Pakistan, which President Obama has endorsed. The admiral said that aid would be seen as a positive sign of American long-term commitment to Pakistan.

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Thom Shanker from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Seeks $3 Billion for Pakistani Military. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe